


what i need

by rizahawkaye



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, First Kiss, I have a lot of feelings, Post-Season/Series 03, Season 3 Finale, almost sex..........almost, eve is a tease, horny villanelle, this may end up being multichap i dunno
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:20:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24532963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rizahawkaye/pseuds/rizahawkaye
Summary: “Quit looking so smug.”“It is not smugness, Eve, it is pleasure.”“Pleasure is a synonym for smug.”“It is not. They are distinct.”[Directly follows the end of S3. I needed.........more and I'll probably continue to need more for a while. Stay tuned.]
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova, Villaneve - Relationship
Comments: 20
Kudos: 209





	1. two

**Author's Note:**

> my first ke fic mmmmmmm

Eve turns away first, her heels kicking up a flame. 

Oksana does not know where they are going. She assumes a hotel. She follows along, pleased but not surprised, until Eve stops at an intersection. Oksana might have walked into traffic if not for bumping her chin into the back of Eve’s head. She was too busy imaging the hotel they might be going to, wondering about what the bedsheets might feel like and whether they will order room service in the morning. Oksana decides that she will want sausage and she hopes Eve will want pancakes, and they can kiss and the flavors will mingle on their tongues.

“Quit looking so smug.”

“It is not smugness, Eve, it is pleasure.”

“Pleasure is a synonym for smug.”

“It is not. They are distinct.” Ahead of them, a green light spreads over the wet concrete. Oksana thinks about it a little more. “They are distinct in my mind,” she says. And then, “Why can I not be both smug and pleased? I was right, you know.” 

Eve snorts.

It’s twenty minutes and an hour long bus ride until Eve is checking them into a hotel. They aren’t on the run, not officially, but Oksana thinks they ought to be. She has spent so much of her life hiding, conniving, knifing. It is odd to stand in open defiance of the Twelve. She is casual amidst the soft golden glow of the chandeliers in the hotel plaza, watching all the ways in which Eve’s hair moves as she speaks, some strands following her head’s movement and others more disobedient, like outlaws. 

“Are we going to share a room?” Oksana asks.

“Yes, but we are not going to sleep.”

“Oh-ho!”

Eve glares. “Stop it,” she says. 

“Are we going to share a bed?”

“I said we aren’t sleeping.”

“I did not mention sleep.” 

Indeed, there is one bed. But there is also a loveseat shoved up against the hotel A/C unit. Violet curtains catch the streetlight from outside and muffle it. Eve fumbles around for a light switch while Oksana waits by the door, which is magnetized, and slams shut without effort. 

“They like to keep these rooms very cold,” says Oksana. Eve finds the light. The room is revealed to them in a sunburst of white. “It is very white in here.” 

“Must you comment on everything?” Eve is pulling things out of her pockets now, dispelling them feverishly. She had been so calm by the water, despite her tears, so thoughtful. For a moment, her beautiful face had not been assaulted by anger or frustration. Oksana places a hand on Eve’s forearm, says, “Eve.”

When Eve looks up at her, she says, “Yes, I certainly must comment on everything.” 

Eve scoffs and turns her face away, spreading credit cards and IDs over the stark white bedding. “What are you doing?” Not a comment, but a question. Fair game.

“Thinking,” Eve says. 

“By looking at cards?” Another question. 

“Carolyn has gone off the diving board of sanity into a pool of insanity. Konstantin may have killed Kenny. I killed, well, helped you kill, Dasha. It’s not safe here. Someone might have seen us on that bridge.”

“I can protect you.” Oksana says it very quietly, while Eve is still talking nonsense to herself. She is whimpering about murder when murder is her whole job? Was her whole job, before the dumplings. Konstantin had told Oksana about the dumplings. She thinks of Eve in an apron, rolling and pinching dumplings in a hot kitchen, unprotected with so many potential weapons gathered around her. Her stomach clenches. “I can protect you, Eve.” Oksana’s fingers grip Eve tighter. 

“I need to learn how to protect myself.” Eve says. The words are biting. 

Eve wants to know how she can make it all stop. Oksana knows that there is no way. You can want or not want, but what you are will climb its way out of you anyway. Oksana resigned herself to that when she burned the orphanage down. She did it again when she killed her mother. She wonders what Eve will do when she finally understands.

“Sure you do,” says Oksana. She lowers herself to the bed and, though she was adamant, Eve joins her. She sits on her credit cards and her passport and a flock of spare change. “I can teach you. Although, I do not think you are weak. You have protected yourself from me.” 

The way the gun had bucked into her hand, the sound of the shot reverberating off stone, crashes into Oksana’s brain. How different would her life be if she had stuck around to be sure Eve was dead? 

“Do I need to protect myself from you?” The question is a gut-punch, though Oksana would never admit to it. “You’ve tried to kill me.”

“You have tried to kill me.”

“I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“You didn’t know knives could cut? They must use them differently in London.”

“We were in Paris.” Now it is Eve who looks smug. “And I’m American.”

What had it meant when they turned to one another on the bridge? 

Oksana dips her head, just a test, and kisses the corner of Eve’s mouth. This is different from their last kiss, which was a furious smashing of lips meant to disarm. Oksana lets her mouth linger, feels the heat pile up in her body and the millimeters of space between her and Eve’s skin. She is about to say something when Eve turns and catches Oksana’s mouth with her own. 

Yes, the kiss on the bus was so very, very different. This time Oksana has time to note the roundness of Eve’s lips, like peaches, and the softness, like satin. Oksana puts her hands on Eve’s face and tilts her head back, teasing Eve’s mouth with her tongue. “Let me in, Eve.” 

“I’ve never kissed a woman before,” says Eve. Her lashes are moths on the tops of her cheeks, resting, waiting. Eve and Oksana are breathing in the same lazy rhythm. 

“It is not all that different from kissing a man.” Oksana lies. It is very different; it is intoxicating, like good Vodka, and women know how to do it better because women know what women want. Oksana knows what Eve wants just by measuring the catch of her breaths in her throat, and the way her right leg comes up over her left thigh, her torso twisting in Oksana’s direction. It is natural to be anxious, but Eve is also naturally brave — a lethal combination Oksana can’t wait to unravel. 

“I don’t believe that.” 

Oksana laughs. “You would not believe me if I told you the sky was blue.” Then, before Eve can say anything else, Oksana returns to kissing her. Her attention can only be split for so long — wit or sex, wit or sex — and she wants Eve more than she wants to be clever. 

Eve opens her mouth for her, and she moans — _God_ — into Oksana’s mouth. A tiny, breathy moan that Oksana can feel in her throat. She rears up on the bed, pulling her legs up so that she is resting on her knees. She wants to slam Eve into the mattress, put her mouth on her wetness, and bring her to her peak. She wants Eve’s fingers in her hair, tugging; she wants her whining out Oksana’s name. Oksana is quite good at sex, and she is ready — oh, she is so, so ready — to show Eve just how good.

“Have you heard about binary stars?” Eve says. Oksana runs her tongue over Eve’s jawline. “No,” she says, and her voice comes out low, rough like stone. 

“They’re two stars that, uh,” Eve pauses to breathe. Oksana has plunged down the column of her throat and started to drag her teeth along Eve’s exposed clavicle. “They orbit around the same center of mass.” 

“Are you an astronomer now?” says Oksana. 

“Stop being shitty,” says Eve. “I’m trying to tell you something.”

“How am I being shitty when I am making you feel this way, hm?” Oksana places a kiss in the gap between Eve’s collar bones. Her hands are finally, finally in Oksana’s hair. Her fingernails raze the nape of Oksana’s neck, sending shockwaves down her spine and into her toes.

“I think we are like those stars.” Eve says. “We keep circling and circling one another, occasionally passing by, maybe grazing each other, until we collide.” 

Oksana shoves Eve down on the bed. She is wondering how Eve looks without her sweater on, she wants to know what color bra she is wearing (if, God forbid, any at all) and whether she prefers lace to cotton underwear; she wants to know the curve of Eve’s belly and the noises she’ll make when Oksana is inside of her. 

“I want to have sex with you.” Oksana says. 

“I said we weren’t going to do that.”

Oksana sticks her bottom lip out. “But then how else will we collide like your stars?” 

When Oksana was six, she held matches in her hand and pretended they were sparklers. She got her brother to teach her how to strike them against the brick in the yard. That year, at age six, Oksana had set the barn on fire. She watched it from six feet away, her face burning, her brother screaming at her side.

Eve takes Oksana’s hand — the fire-starter, the sparkler-holder — and presses her fingers to her lips. 

“We already have,” she says.


	2. pda

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter was just me typing "expensive [insert furniture/clothing here]" repeatedly into the google search bar until i found what i was looking for
> 
> i cant believe i did research for this. what is southampton? i dont know, i googled cities around london and chose southampton because its roughly 70 miles away. ive never been further than chicago so i apologize for inaccuracies
> 
> anyway, i think we have plot now?

**The next morning…**

They’re waiting in line at a chips and ice cream stand. The pier’s timber is warm under Oksana’s calfskin sandals. The sun beads sweat over her brow and rolls it down her back. She should put her hair up, she muses, but she doesn’t want to, not while Eve’s is not up, and her clip is in their hotel room, sleeping in her red Fendi. She feels fine when the breeze caresses her ankles anyway, ripples her midi dress and pulls at the hair stuck at her nape. It is a nice day, although a bit humid. 

The chips and ice cream stand is derelict but painted in such a way as to hide the fact. The roof is a brilliant red, lighter in tone than Oksana’s red Fendi bag, and the front and sides are striped in red, white, and blue. The man in the center of the stand’s yellowing counter is balding, though he’s tried to comb what little hair he does have over the crown of his shining head. He has blackened teeth, all crowded around together in his mouth, except for one thin gap between his front two incisors. 

Eve asks for a strawberry and chocolate swirl in a paper cup. “Small, please.” Oksana requests vanilla in a sugar cone. “Dipped, thank you.” Eve gets clever about it, joking that Oksana is anything but vanilla.

“It is ice cream, Eve,” Oksana says. She’s only half listening to Eve, her attention on a set of children on an ironwood bench. They are wearing matching pink tunics and capri jeans. Their arms are interlocked, and they’re taking turns cramming their ice cream into one another’s mouths, getting it stuck in their blond braids. They giggle, and Oksana wants to push them backward into the water fountain and watch as their mouths form giant, disbelieving Os. 

A pigeon takes flight at Oksana’s feet and breaks her trance.

“I’m saying that someone who spends her every cent on the most elaborate outfits I have ever seen should have a more eclectic taste in ice cream.” Eve says. “I’m saying that you once hung a man by his ankles and ripped him open for an audience in De Wallen.”

Oksana remembers that kill well. Her spine gives a little shiver. “I think you just like to argue with me,” she says, and takes a full bite of her cone. It’s glazed in chocolate at the top and she licks it off her lips as it melts and she chews. “I think it turns you on, to know what you can get away with with me.”

“I think you’re conceited,” Eve says, “and like to make everything about sex.”

“I do not make everything about sex, Eve.”

“But you are conceited.”

“It is healthy to think highly of oneself.”

Seagulls and booming voices of fishermen snag Oksana’s attention then. She turns her head to the berth, and the noise, and the glinting sea. It is filled with all manner of boats, each in the city to bring people or goods, or to usher people to and from the open sea. The docks nearest the pier are crowded with sweaty men, their boots sloshing and stomping over the wetted wood and their bodies smelling indefinitely of fish and seaweed, which also smells a bit like fish. The ocean in Southampton laps at the columns of the pier and the hulls of all the boats. Oksana might have never come to this place herself, having no desire to become a Sotonian nor bleed into a sea of just over two-hundred thousand people, but Eve had insisted that was what made Southampton such an effective hiding place. Neither Konstantin nor Carolyn would think to look here in this touristy and outdated port. But Oksana is not so convinced. The Twelve has eyes everywhere.

They weave their way through side streets and in between white apartment buildings and crumbling baroque churches and hotels. The clocktower near the Civic Center looks ready to fall on their heads, and Oksana eyes it skeptically as they pause so Eve can throw her paper cup away. They find a bench and sit on it, saying nothing, watching the people as they pass by, ushered forward by the salt-tinted breeze coming off the ocean. 

Later in the afternoon, Oksana follows Eve into and through the shopping centre in West Quay. It is a strange, distinctly modern building, contrasted against the aging architecture of Town Quay. The inside’s white floors and golden lighting clash with the craggy brick and stone of old Southampton, from before the port sold out to tourism and cruise ships. Money burns a hole in Oksana’s pocket, not much but enough that she feels the familiar itch to spend. Someone’s shoulder knocks into hers as she and Eve navigate their way to the escalator, and Oksana doles out her pretty, malign smile to the back of the careless patron’s head. 

“There are so many people here,” Oksana says. “Is there a reason why we must be shopping right now, Eve?” 

Eve ignores her and makes a bee line for the glistening store front of an H. Samuel. _Est. in 1862_ is what the heading beneath the store name says. The man at the counter is spindly, all jutting elbows and cutting cheek bones. He grins at them, showing Oksana his teeth, and she smiles back with uncertainty. “Eve?” she tries again. 

Eve exchanges pleasantries with the store clerk whose mouth moves in wide oval shapes, big enough that Oksana can see his gums. “There was someone at the top of the escalator,” Eve whispers when she’s finished with the man and they are circling cases of studded rings in the center of the room. Oksana plays with the glass hexagon case, the rings inside of it winking at her under golden bulbs. She imagines placing one of those rings on Eve, pretends that she can feel the slide of her fingers over Eve’s. 

“Are you listening to me, asshole?” Eve hisses from the opposite side of the glass hexagon. She is so beautiful, her eyes catching the glint of the diamonds. 

“Yes, yes, a person.” Oksana waves her hand as if waving off gnats. “You are aware, Eve, that there are a lot of people here? Quite a few, actually. More than a thousand, I would guess.” Oksana rounds the glass case. She puts her fingers in Eve’s hair, her palms cradling Eve’s jaw. She pulls Eve up and close like she means to kiss her. “If you are worried we have been found out,” she says, “we can move cities. There are many others in this country and beyond, you know. Have you heard of Austin? I know America is shit but I have heard Austin is fun.”

“She was wearing a black blazer and black boots,” Eve says. Oksana is always amazed at the way Eve ignores her so completely, like she had never heard her say anything in the first place. “She’s been trailing us since we boarded the bus to West Quay.”

“And you mention this only now?”

“I thought you would have been astute enough to notice for yourself.”

“I thought we were safe here,” Oksana says. She drags her nails over Eve’s scalp. “Someone told me we would not be found.” At the same time she says this, Oksana is making a mental note of the people she has seen in their afternoon out in Southampton: A woman with wolfish eyes, and a man with a faded shadow for a beard; children smashing ice cream into one another’s faces and a balding man behind a dying chips and ice cream counter. What did the person who bumped shoulders with Oksana look like? Red hair blurred in Oksana’s memory, licking past her consciousness like a flame. She hadn’t gotten to see well enough to notice much else. 

Oksana curses under her breath. She removes her hands from Eve’s face and takes her hand instead, sneaking her through the maze of display cases and behind the clerk into a black back door, with a courteous label: STAFF ONLY. It was one thing to be careless in her own company, and another entirely to be careless in Eve’s. Though Oksana had been trained extensively in the art of performing counter-surveillance (as evidenced by her three weeks with a Han Chinese man holed away in a battered hotel on the stinky outskirts of London) she had, as of late, let the skill fall away with the rest of her questionable past. 

The room beyond the black door is decorated not in boxes of merchandise or pallets of gems, but a rich, velvety PlumeBlanche sofa. Deep burgundy red, darker than blood, the sofa blends effortlessly into the black walled room, only lit by the gentle whitish yellow glow of wall lamps and a dimmed and glittering overhead chandelier. More display cases reach wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling against the wall directly opposite the back room’s entryway, and the shining jewels within them cast specks of light over the sofa and the stout, deep brown coffee table set in front of it. 

“Quite a mood they have set in here, huh?” Oksana says. She does a sweep of the room with her eyes and locks the door with her free hand. The clerk undoubtedly has a key, but Oksana will benefit from the seconds it takes him to first realize the door is locked and then fumble with the keys on his belt to unlock it. Eve disentangles her hand from Oksana’s and falls into a Victorian style armchair at the corner of the intricate floor rug. She props her feet up on the coffee table. “That is not polite Eve.”

“Fuck polite,” says Eve. She’s thrusts a forearm over her eyes. “We aren’t supposed to be in here in the first place. You realize there are cameras all over this store?”

“I am only working with what you gave me. Who hides from a potential contract killer in a mall?”

“There are a lot of people in here. I thought that would be an advantage.”

“Yes, until we are caught by CCTV or the bubbly jewelry salesman.” Oksana says. “Is it just me or is he very reminiscent of a naked tree?”

Eve sighs. Clearly, she is stressed. 

Oksana removes Eve’s forearm from her face. She bends forward, almost at a ninety degree angle, until she is nose-to-nose with Eve. “I will keep you safe,” she says, reiterating what she had told Eve the previous night. 

Before, Eve’s heart rate would have given her away. Oksana would have been able to see it pulse hard against the softer parts of her throat, or feel it through the skin and muscle of her arm. The desire to conquer — that heady, all-encompassing need to be wanted and to be in possession of that want — courses through Oksana now. It is a feeling that she can never fulfill with sex, but that she tries to, and that is only satisfied by the cheerful affair of taking someone’s life. 

It’s different with Eve, though. 

Oksana leans into the armchair, which is too firm to give into her weight. She places her knee between Eve’s thighs and Eve’s breath catches. There, Oksana can feel the flutter of Eve’s heart in her fingertips, but it’s not the sputtering of anxiety. It’s languid anticipation. Eve’s lips are parted and Oksana kisses them once and then twice, and on the third kiss she slips her tongue into Eve’s mouth. All at once she is overcome with that roiling desire. She gives her knee into momentum and it glides further into the crook of Eve’s thighs, pressing into her. Eve makes a breathy noise against Oksana’s mouth. 

“Fuck the Twelve,” says Oksana, “we should go back to our hotel and I can make you feel good, Eve. The anxieties will just,” Oksana runs a finger between Eve’s legs, over the barrier of her slacks, “...fall away.” Eve throws her head back, hands knuckling the chair’s gilded arm rests, body bearing down on Oksana’s hand and knee, chasing pressure. 

It’s at the moment that Oksana intends to press a kiss to Eve’s neck that the fumbling with the door starts. Oksana pauses, hovering. Her eyes roll as a rectangle of light slams into the room. Oksana turns from Eve, who is scrambling to right herself, and fixes the interrupter with a cocksure smile. “Can I help you?” she says to the now-imperturbable clerk. His eyes are cast in shadows thanks to the darkness of the room and he looks, suddenly, like a lanky bird of prey. 

He holds a postcard out for Oksana to take. She feels the familiar tangle of excitement in her gut, but it’s tempered by dread, and the feel of Eve’s eyes on her back. “Thank you but you should know you have just cockblocked me and I will be complaining to your manager.” 

The clerk takes a step into the back room. He smiles. “Someone has just dropped this off for you. 

“Konstantin sends his best.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i made a killing eve blog if anyone's interested. i have seven followers and i love them dearly: villaxnelle.tumblr.com


End file.
